I’ve been at the Virus Bulletin 2012 conference in Dallas, Texas this week and there have been a lot of good presentations. I took notes on over 20 of them and thought I’d write about some of the more memorable ones. One of them was a presentation entitled...

For many years, I have tracked spam from botnets and reported on it on this blog. I have analyzed those botnets’ distribution patterns by number of IPs, number of messages per email envelope and geographical distribution. While spam from botnets is interesting...

The Flynn Effect
Some of the most phished brands are Paypal, HSBC, Bank of America, Facebook, and eBay. All of these sites have security policies set up on their home pages and they are all fairly similar – they use education as a means of informing...

Solutions
So how do we get people to stop falling for scams?
Will Cognition Save Us?
Thinking about it - Thinking about a decision often changes people’s minds. When people are asked to justify why they like a particular choice, they...

Impact
We humans had Stone Age ancestors for a long time and our limbic systems kept us alive; when we feel afraid of something, say snakes, it is because our brains are hard wired to avoid things that could harm us. The fear response is actually a...

Spam, Emotion and Decision
Researchers distinguish between two types of emotions – expected emotions and immediate emotions. Expected emotions are predictions about how we will feel if certain decision outcomes occur. They are forward looking...

The Limbic System
The limbic system is the center of emotion in the brain and it governs much of our non-conscious behavior.
We know from psychological studies that people will sometimes engage in behavior counter to their own best interests in...

In honor of the Virus Bulletin conference next week in Dallas, at which I am presenting my ideas for email over IPv6, I thought I’d post my 2010 paper on this blog (plus, I need fresh material and I currently have writer’s block, plus I am...